I have a Maxtor DiamondMax10 250GB SATA-II drive that with a jumper can be capped at sata1 speeds. My motherboard doesn't completely support it for some reason, I can not normally reboot. If I do, my windows will not load. I've tried reinstalls that usually take me more luck than I care to admit to get the drive to work, or not. Can't do dual boots or the hard drives get confused. I've tried MBR resets on both drives, bios updates. Maxtor (when it was maxtor) blamed MSI, MSI blamed the nForce chipset, nForce of course blamed no one since they didn't reply (yeah, nVidia). There were patches, sure, but none of them really worked. I can't format the drive, or rather I couldn't. Now I can partially, but the drive reads as 390GB and old partitions on it, magically re-appeared lol. So, Maxtor and MSI got bad points in support, so I will not go there.

Can I ask though, Bob, which mobo you have now? That's always my main "wtf do I get" thing.

Now I've got a Gigabyte DS3L P35. I love it. It has a ton of support (from forums and the official site) if I ever need it, but have never had a problem. Before this one, I actually used a EVGA NF47 with my 3700+. I got it free from newegg after I bought a 7800GT. Funny thing is I ended up rma'ing the card 6 months later and they were out of stock so they gave me back full value of the card and let me keep my mobo haha. But that thing was a pos. It didn't even have it's own driver section on EVGA's site, and its overclocking ability was poor. So I made sure when I bought my next one to get a popular model, which was the Gigabyte.

Nowadays the P35 has been replaced by the EP35, which is essentially the same thing, except I heard it wasn't as stable/good as mine. They still gotta work on the drivers. I've heard though that the EP45 is a good board.

Thanks for that solid advice, Bob. I was leaning towards Asus or Gigabyte myself. Evga is rare here, very. As is Foxconn, but I know very little about their motherboards, so I am shying away from them. I don't plan on overclocking though, I have a tendency to "if it is breakable by doing something, even when done right, i'll break it 10 times over".

I'm currently using a Abit board and its the best mobo I've ever owned it just works no messing no question no hassle stress free working to boot. I've had gigabtye and things in the past and not really had loads of complaits to be fair but this abit board is something else.

Yes, but extreme visual effects affect your framerate due to their CPU time consumption, not their static memory footprint. :P

Quote from Willbailey »

Not sure if its just me but I certainly find my game runs a lot better with less addons running. I used to run around 100 MB of junk which used to choke things up, more lag than framerates thou.

Again, CPU time and increasing memory consumption are what affects performance. If your addons used 500 MiB of memory, but never increased the amount of memory they used, and never did any processing, it would have absolutely no effect on performance (unless your machine didn't have enough RAM).

I'm itching to build a new computer; my machine is 4 years old and I've done all I can to it aside from an expensive/pointless CPU upgrade.

I have no bearded dragon, but if I did, I'm sure my computer would make it mock me too.

I've already done my online "window shopping", now I have to make sure Ubuntu will play nice, and work on saving up.

As for current rig's fps, I get an average of 11 when in Outland. I ran Hellfire Ramparts with an average of 22fps which was rather surprising. If I'm in an enclosed space, I can exceed 60fps, but these spaces are usually combat-free. Like an inn.

I had been hoping that the RAM increase would help, and though it did, it obviously wasn't going to help increase my fps dramatically. I think, if I had your video card, the game would maybe average 30fps in Outland, but that's just a guess.

That is a nice terrarium setup :D A pretty lizard too. I'm sure the mocking is done in a "I love you because you feed me" way ;)